Abstract

This papers starts from the observation that in a world of pathologising and ableist autism science, identifying as autistic has meant battling between the necessity of putting words on lived experience and the risk of contributing to self-pathologising through problematic metaphors or frameworks. Following the contribution to feminist epistemology offered by Donna Haraway, I ponder the “science question in autism” and ask to what kinds of situated knowledge autistics can actually pretend. To do so, I use the theory of Monotropism and its reception. First, I show how the theory of Monotropism constitutes a case of situated knowledge of autism and could pretend to a higher form of objectivity. Then, I show that its production, diffusion, and reception rely on non-innocent metaphors of nonhuman movement, mostly taken from physics and plant life, starting with the very term “tropism”, which tends to assimilate autistic cognition to the physicochemical reaction of plants to their environments. Finally, I show how, in the age of a hegemony of reductionist science and of renewed binary debates opposing free will and biological determinism, the theory of Monotropism is sometimes taken up in a form that fuels a self-pathologising of autistic individuals. In turn, I call for more accountability and reflexivity in the production and diffusion of autistic situated knowledges.